All students at HSC CoWorks want to get better marks so that they have lots of courses to choose from when the offers come out. The key to achieving better marks is consistently stretching and challenging yourself with your study so that you are always moving outside your comfort zone to learn new skills and perform consistently at a higher level.

So what is “stretch and challenge”?

Let’s use the example of two people working out at the gym. Person A uses the treadmill and barely works up a sweat and goes at a very easy pace as they always do. Person A has achieved more than someone who is not going to the gym but only just.

Person B on the other hand knows that in order to see any improvement in their fitness in strength they need to push themselves to a level where they are outside of their comfort zone. They jump on the treadmill and increase the speed from 10 to 11 from their last session two days ago and run for an extra 5 minutes.

You don’t need to be a genius to work out which person is going to see better results towards their goals. If Person B was to engage a Personal Trainer to facilitate even more stretch and challenge the better results will come sooner. The best workouts are ALWAYS the workouts that took us out of our comfort zone.

The same goes for studying for the HSC. Stretching and challenging yourself will be more fun, will produce better results, giving you more options at Uni.

Strategies for stretching and challenging yourself

• Build a topic mindmap and write it out under exam conditions as many times as you need to so it is “tattooed” to your brain.
• Attempt a past HSC paper (or part of) under timed exam conditions
• Attempt lots of different questions to ensure you fully understand the concept
• Write introductory paragraphs to a few different questions and submit for marking
• Memorise your quotes for each of your English texts
• Self evaluate one of your essays and look to see how you can improve it by one or two marks
• Ask the coaches for some more challenging questions

The importance of mistakes when Stretching and Challenging

One of our favourite quotes is “As long as I learn I will make mistakes” so we as we are learning making mistakes is actually a good thing as we will learn from these mistakes. As you stretch and challenge yourself at HSC CoWorks you will make mistakes but this is a perfect opportunity to look at how you can attempt it differently next time. Think of HSC CoWorks as your mistake making zone where you are supported by a team of coaches who are trained to support you make new insights on how to do it better.

Benefits to stretching and challenging yourself

• It’s way more fun
• You learn more
• You prepare yourself for the exam room much better
• You give yourself an advantage over those who don’t stretch and challenge themselves
• Much more efficient use of your time
• Build your confidence for the task at hand
• More chance of learning new and better ways to approach a task

Our role as your HSC Coach is to stretch and challenge you so if we ask you to get out of your comfort zone it’s only because we know that the extra marks you are looking for can be found here.

Let’s do this!

Jesse, Fergus and the rest of the HSC CoWorks Team.